Nowhere and Back Again: Minas Morgul (Patreon)

CW: white supremacism, neo-Nazism.

Names: Minas Ithil (Sindarian: “Tower of the (Rising) Moon”) when held by Gondor, Minas Morgul (Sindarin: “Tower of Sorcery”) under Mordor occupation.

Location in Peter Jackson’s films:

Description: An outpost city in a valley (later Morgul Vale) Ephel Dúath on Mordor’s westen border, founded as Minas Ithil after S.A. (Second Age) 3320 by Isildur, a survivor of Númenor, as royal seat of the fiefdom Ithilien (opposite his brother Anárion’s Minas Anor [later Minas Tirith] rule of the fiefdom Anórien) and home of the Ithil-stone palantír. In S.A. 3429 Sauron takes Minas Ithil in an assault on Mordor. After the Last Alliance of Men and Elves defeats Mordor in S.A. 3429, Minas Ithil is reclaimed by Gondor and made a sentinel city to watch the borders of Mordor. In T.A. (Third Age) 2000, the Nazgûl besiege Minas Ithil and reclaim it for Mordor in T.A. 2002, “afterwards known as Minas Morgul.”Minas Morgul is corrupted and no longer associated with Ithilien, and the Nazgûl take the Ithil-stone to Sauron, who uses it to ensnare Saruman of Isengard and Lord Denethor of Minas Tirith. For the duration of the Third Age, Minas Morgul becomes a major military asset of Mordor and home to the Nazgûl. After the forces of Minas Morgul are wholly defeated in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields in T.A. (Third Age) 3019, the Army of the West raids the abandoned city. At the end of the War of the Ring, the newly crowned king Aragorn orders that Minas Morgul be demolished and vacated.

More than any landmark we’ve seen, Minas Morgul emblemizes Tolkien’s fascination with putrefaction and the Fall. A horribly resplendent city in a dark valley, it is a monument to the lost glory of Númenor, and later to the corrosive power of Sauron. A fairly realistic city in terms of its history, Minas Morgul trades hands several times in the late Second and Third Ages, before ultimately falling to Mordor. Minas Morgul is one of many places to fall to evil in Middle-earth; seismic geographic and cultural shifts define Tolkien. Middle-earth is always in the midst of the Fall, yet also fending it off, not quite succeeding. The glory of the Elder Days ends at the close of The Lord of the Rings as the Elves go into the West, although their virtues remain with their heirs. The Lord of the Rings is a tragedy in this way, where utter catastrophe is avoided, but a great and final triumph of good never occurs either.

Minas Morgul is highly indicative of this moral changeability. Its origins as the post-Númenórean beacon of Minas Ithil are ultimately betrayed, as it becomes an emblem of terror and occupation. Let’s look at that second one, actually, because it’s important. Occupation is strictly performed by Tolkien’s antagonists; when his protagonists are drawn into battle (and they’re always provoked), they fight their battles, but they don’t subdue people or take their lands. Tolkien’s ethnocentric fantasy hardly adopts all the avarice of the rabid imperialist; it’s tempered by Catholic mercy. Unlike the heroes of Tolkien’s favorite Icelandic and Finnish sagas, the heroes of Middle-earth don’t take treasure and women as they see fit; they fight their battles and return home. A cardinal sin of Morgoth, Sauron, and Saruman is their disparagement of other cultures and subduing of people’s ways of life. There’s a core of cultural isolationism to this philosophy; Tolkien endorses the healthy relations of different cultures and countries but asserts that they should be their own entities with distinct cultural identities. So while the sociocultural politics of The Lord of the Rings are deeply fucked, coming short of anything resembling racial equity (Middle-earth can only be at peace when a descendent of Númenor rules Gondor, and some cultures really are better than others), Tolkien’s sympathy for colonialism is virtually null, and confounds a direction equation of his work with the simplistic white supremacism of his imitators.

Still, the central paradox of Tolkien’s work, an at times white supremacist embrace of the aesthetics of Western European mythologies crossed with a truly Catholic generosity of spirit, comes to a head on subjects like miscegination, for which Minas Morgul serves almost as a direct metaphor. When Elrond speaks of the works of Elves and Númenórean descendants in Middle-earth at his eponymous council, the race essentialist undertones are clear:

‘In the South the realm of Gondor long endured; and for a while its splendour grew, recalling somewhat of the might of Númenor, ere it fell. [...] Their chief city was Osgiliath, Citadel of the Stars, through the midst of which the River flowed. And Minas Ithil they built, Tower of the Rising Moon, eastward upon a shoulder of the Mountains of Shadow; and westward at the feet of the White Mountains Minas Anor they made, Tower of the Setting Sun. There in the courts of the King grew a white tree, from the seed of that tree which Isildur brought over the deep waters, and the seed of that tree before came from Eressëa, and before that out of the Uttermost West in the Days before days when the world was young.‘But in the wearing of the swift years of Middle-earth the line of Meneldil son of Anárion failed, and the Tree withered, and the blood of the Númenóreans became mingled with that of lesser men. Then the watch upon the walls of Mordor slept, and dark things crept back to Gorgoroth. And on a time evil things came forth, and they took Minas Ithil and abode in it, and they made it a place of dread; and it is called Minas Morgul, the Tower of Sorcery.’

Characteristically, Tolkien equates sorcery with blemishing, of taking the natural order for one’s self and using it to one’s own ends. The sacking of Minas Morgul is a protracted act of sorcery; it takes what was once a reminder of heaven and makes it a temple of evil where figures like the Nazgûl can dwell (in their way) and unleash armies on Middle-earth. More disturbingly, sorcery here is pretty directly equated with miscegenation. It’s hard to misread “the blood of the Númenórean became mingled with that of lesser men” as anything less than race and culture essentialism. This is hardly Elrond’s view alone either, as Boromir then steps forward to defend Gondor’s honor:

‘Believe not that in the land of Gondor the blood of Númenor is spent, nor all its pride and dignity forgotten. By our valour the wild folk of the East are still restrained, and the terror of Morgul kept at bay; and thus alone are peace and freedom maintained in the lands behind us, bulwark of the West. But if the passages of the River should be won, what then?’

The West is not presented as some infallible source of good either — although its cardinal sin is largely present as its lack of vigilance in fortifying itself. But the East’s attacks on the West ultimately diminish its cultural purity. Indeed, appropriation, an equal act to occupation in Tolkien’s theodicy, also plays into the downfall of Minas Ithil. As Minas Ithil houses a palantír, the Nazgûl seize it and gift it to Sauron, as speculated by Gandalf:

‘But one [palantír] at lease Sauron must have obtained and mastered to his purposes. I guess that it was the Ithil-stone, for he took Minas Ithil long ago and turned it into an evil place: Minas Morgul, it has become.’

The failures of both Gondor and Mordor contribute to the decrepitude of Minas Morgul. And yet some of Minas Ithil’s glory ekes through Minas Morgul’s darkness. The city glows, and yet it emits no light. It throbs with the still-beating heart of some awful monster, and no longer lives:

All was dark about [Minas Morgul], earth and sky, but it was lit with light. Not the imprisoned moonlight welling through the marble walls of Minas Ithil long ago, Tower of the Moon, fair and radiant in the hollow of the hills. Paler indeed than the moon ailing in some slow eclipse was the light of it now, wavering and blowing like a noisome exhalation of decay, a corpse-light, a light that illuminated nothing. In the walls and tower windows showed, like countless black holes looking inward into emptiness; but the topmost course of the tower revolved slowly, first one way and then another, a huge ghostly head leering into the night.

Frankly, this passage is the coolest fucking thing in The Lord of the Rings. As a child, Minas Morgul was the Middle-earth location that most intrigued me, particularly in The Return of the King’s adaptation of the sequence (what did the interiors look like, I wondered). Frodo, Sam, and Gollum are spellbound by the city as well (“for a moment the three companions stood there, shrinking, staring up with unwilling eyes”). Bits of Minas Ithil remain in Morgul — there’s still a “white bridge” of Númenórean build, crossing a stream, which is surrounded by “pale white flowers,” which are “luminous,” “beautiful yet horrible of shape” and emitting “a faint sickening charnel-smell.” There’s a seductiveness to this whole passage; one intended as the suffocating power of evil, but embodying a certain transgressive appeal. It’s uglier and scarier than just about anywhere in Middle-earth, betraying all that is noble in Tolkien’s world. And it’s hard not to be somewhat captivated by it.

The equivalent scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (as the Morgul scene is moved from late in The Two Towers to earlier in The Return of the King as a result of the film trilogy’s change of the Rings’ structure) fixates on this, bringing to life the statues at the bridge’s end, “carven with cunning in forms human and bestial, but all corrupt and loathsome.” Peter Jackson’s career as a director of horror films and Weta Workshop’s delight in the grotesque and monstrous show all too clearly in this scene, culminating in a scene where a great pillar of light and lightning explodes from the Morgul tower into the sky, visible for miles around (one wonders if we can blame The Lord of the Rings for every subsequent blockbuster featuring this image in their denouements — although to Rings’ credit, this happens not even halfway through the film). The book merely depicts “a great rumbling noise,” followed by “a red flash” which “leapt into the sky and splashed the lowering clouds with crimson,” and then the emergence of the Witch-King of Angmar and a host of orcs. If there’s one thing Jackson’s version accomplishes, it’s establishing Mordor as an indomitable force. If it does two things well, it makes Mordor look extremely fucking cool.

Most of Middle-earth lacks this property of coolness. Hobbits have a niche appeal mostly limited to cottagecore hipster aesthetics, Men are either truculent or antiquated, Elves are stylish and camp but above it all, and Dwarves are perhaps the biggest can of worms of them all. When Sauron and the Nazgûl step forward with their dark cloaks and fell creatures of the air, it’s enough to set any Goth off. I’m not sure that my descent into the Gothic wasn’t subconsciously influenced by my experiences with Mordor. Mordor is the great transgression in Tolkien, and when Frodo and Aragorn and Théoden are consistently making noble choices, the presence of primordial darkness is cathartic.

Darkness is of course an aesthetic that presents something radical. As author Leila Taylor writes in her book Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul:

The phrase “[something] is the new black” means to be the new classic, the new basic, the next necessary thing. The color black signals a kind of unaffected cool, a latent self-possession that is at once alluring and intimidating, something carefully considered and effortless at the same time. Blackness, for the same reasons, is codified as cool, signaling a hipness that since white people started going to jazz clubs in Harlem has been co-opted and commodified for non-Black consumption. Blackness on non-Black people signals a pretense of outside rebellion and anti-establishment bravado.

Tolkien’s pervasive usage of “black” as an adjective is politically loaded. His villains are Black Riders, who utter the Black Speech, while the iniquitous and concupiscent have “black” hearts, and Gollum is “dark as darkness” (The Hobbit, “Riddles in the Dark”). “Black is a color, a mood, and a state of being, and all of these attributes contribute to the construction of Black as a race,” continues Taylor. In effect, Tolkien, while having little to say about Black people (we’ll discuss that more once we leave Mordor), his condensation of Orientalist tropes, xenophobia, and transgression on ethnic lines effectually otherizes the majority of his antagonists, making them into one race that’s roughly just non-Western.

What must ask, then, why white supremacists and black metal musicians have attached themselves to Mordor. The best-known example is Varg Vikernes, noted neo-Nazi and convicted murderer, who named his band Burzum after the Black Speech word for “darkness.” Let’s address him first. One might ask why a white supremacist would align himself with the Orientalist villains of an English fantasy novel. A simple (and correct) answer is tempting: nazis are fucking stupid and can’t read. But a more interesting answer accounts for politics and psychology, which tells us something about both Tolkien and his neo-Nazi wannabe-acolytes. In a fascinatingly absurd (and predictably antisemitic) blog post, Vikernes unpacks the rationale behind his choice of band names:

In my teenage interpretation I saw the Hobbits as children or simply boring. The dwarves reminded me too much of greedy capitalist-like pigs and they too were pretty boring. Their rules were cool and Moria was a wonderful place, but I disliked their greed vehemently - and who wants to be short anyhow? The elves were fascinating, beautiful and especially their immortality and closeness to nature was cool, but they were kind of dull and they fought for the wrong side. Instead I felt a natural attraction to Sauron, who was the person who gave the world adventure, adversity and challenges in the first place.

Vikernes proceeds into a rant where he incoherently declares the Orcs to vikings, and accuses Tolkien of “turn[ing] Óðinn (Odin) into Sauron and my Pagan forefathers into fighting Uruk-hai.” So perhaps just concluding that Vikernes is stupid is less reductive than thought. The closest he comes to a truth is concluding that Tolkien was antipathetic to Paganism, and even that conclusion comes from knowing anything about Catholicism and its relationship to pagans and occultists. Impressively, Vikernes’ white supremacism is so extreme and myopic he fails to even detect racism that concurs with his values. More telling is Vikernes’ fetishistic solipsism, juvenile fixation on ‘coolness’, and ethnonationalist myopia. There’s a fundamental immaturity to Vikernes that Tolkien does not share. As a result, Tolkien is honest in a way Vikernes can never be. His pathologies are clear in his work, and he has a (hugely flawed) understanding of history. Vikernes has nothing but trappings, the appropriation of the past with none of its history. Tolkien fully embraces the history, setting him far above his imitators, and reiterating one of the core truths of his work: underneath the fear of appearances, there’s always a deeper horror story.